Said the president: “For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and, at times, a policy-making arm of the Government. … [T]his quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.”

This dire warning about the propensity of the Central Intelligence Agency to go rogue came from Harry S. Truman.

Truman’s call to “limit the CIA role to intelligence” was published in December 22, 1963, by the Washington Post (WaPo). The same newspaper is now decrying Presidents Trump’s decision to “end the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.”

The move is a good one. The WaPo threw Russia into the reportorial mix purely to sully President Trump (and due to the intellectual deficiencies of correspondents incapable of teasing apart policy from political intrigue).

The 33rd U.S. president, a Democrat before the great deformation of that party, was first to issue the warning against the agency he had established. Not only was the newly founded intelligence arm of President Truman mutating into “a policy-making arm of government,” but it was “a subverting influence in the affairs of other people,” he cautioned.

In 1963, Truman was meditating on restoring the monster he had created “to its original assignment” of intelligence gathering in the raw. The CIA’s sole purpose was to keep the president apprised of information unfiltered, un-politicized.

In 2017, Trump is dealing with a genie too powerful to beat back into the bottle: a mutated swamp creature.

So, is this a screeching U-turn in Trump’s foreign policy? Who know, but in Syria, at least, President Trump is inching closer to delivering on a campaign promise. …